Conservative columnist Heather MacDonald recently bemoaned the mentally ill people roaming the streets of our city. She describes the failure of civil institutions to protect regular people from these people. Texas Republican Governor Abbott thinks that better mental health care is the solution to mass casualty shootings plaguing his state. Mental Health is the solution to these twin social ills the country is facing.
Better Mental Health certainly would help. The problem is what exactly are the solutions these Mental Health critics offering to meet these problems. Where will these mentally ill people be housed? Who will pay for their housing and medical care? How will their legal rights be protected? How do we identify the mentally ill? What will be the standard for involuntary institutionalization? These all call for the expansion of government oversight and infrastructure. They also all cost money.
How does this happen given the Conservative and Republican distaste for government regulation and taxes? Would they support an increase in taxes to insure that the mentally ill had suitable housing and healthcare? Would they support the psychological testing of gun buyers to determine if they have violent psychological problems? If protecting citizens is the goal, how much money are they willing to spend to achieve this goal? How do they propose protecting citizens from the criminally insane without a massive expansion of mental health and judicial systems? Prisons are not mental health clinics, putting the criminally insane into prisons
It is all well and good to point the finger at the mental health crisis but what are the mental health solutions? There are a lot of unanswered questions. Until these critics provide proposals to address these questions, their criticism is just loud noise to distract from the emptiness of their vision. They have absolutely nothing to offer that will solve these problems.
Mind Stewing, Fingers Typing 
And all mentally ill individuals have the right to bear arms. Several people have tried to have relatives banned from gun ownership and failed. So will mental healthcare cure them if wanting to kill others or is this a lost cause.
Across-the-board cost savings would be realized by properly addressing vagrancy. For example, 80% of law enforcement calls in my small, rural county are to deal with vagrants, most of whom are either mentally ill and/or substance abusers. Other social services are also heavily burdened.
Possession of firearms is already prohibited by law to anyone adjudicated non compos mentis, and background checks search for mental health records. Unfortunately, all too often, dangerous individuals who should be committed, are not, thus nothing shows up on their background check. A recent example is the Buffalo mass killer, who was released after a 15 minute interview with a mental health professional, despite having made a credible threat of mass murder.
Requiring a psych evaluation exam prior to purchasing a firearm is a non-starter. It’s equivalent to a reading exam for voting, and would be ripe for abuse. No enumerated right should ever be subject to such a prerequisite.
Thanks for reading. Not sure what the proper way of handling vagrancy is. If they are drug addicts and people with mental health problems, something has to be done with them. Do we have the facilities to house and help the number of people who fall into these categories? Do we have the police resources and legal resources to address these numbers? Sending them back into the streets doesn’t solve anything. Jail is expensive and not the right place for drug addicts and mentally afflicted people. Nobody wants them back on the street but some cost will be incurred, so where does that money come from? What I am saying if it is a mental health problem, what changes in how we deal with mental health are being proposed that will address these problems? From what I can see, people are saying mental illness is the problem without offering any suggestions on how a new mental health system would work.
It has to be involuntary commitment. The ‘outreach’ and ‘wrap-around services’ approach is an abject failure.
The Parkland killer was coddled and placed in ‘healing circles.’